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THE 



THIRD ESTATE 



SOUTH. 



By Rev. A. D. Mayo, A.M. 



Reprinted from the 

New England Magazine, of Boston, 

ISSUE OF NOVEMBER, 1890. 



FROM the beginning of the European 
settlement even to the present year 
of our Lord, the most prominent 
object of interest and observation in what 
we used to call the Southern States of this 
Republic has been the relation of the up- 
per and under classes of southern society, 
— the slaveholding Anglo-Saxon and the 
lately emancipated negro. Not only 
abroad, but at home, it has scarcely en- 



tered into the calculations of statesmen 
and economists that a great change in 
southern affairs was impending that would 
bring another dominant class to the front. 
It was known that even in i860 there were 
six million of white people in these south- 
ern states who had no immediate connec- 
tion with slaveholding, and that a number 
of people, smaller than the present popu- 
lation of Boston, representing, possibly, a 



210 



300 



THE THIRD ESTATE OF THE SOUTH. 



population of two million, comprised the 
ruling class. It was expected that this 
middle class would be felt in arresting the 
movement for secession in 1861. And I 
believe that a decided majority of these 
people had neither the desire nor inten- 
tion of striking for a new nationality. But, 
with the exception of the action of West 
Virginia and the stubborn loyalty of the 
mountain populations of the central South, 
this expectation was disappointed. We 
met these people on the battle-field 
through four dismal years, where they 
earned a reputation for good fighting 
which has made the name of an American 
soldiery illustrious. 

But now, like a mighty apparition across 
the southern horizon, has arisen this hope 
or portent of the South, — the Third Es- 
tate, — to challenge the authority of the 
old ruling class, and place itself where the 
" plain people " of every northern state 
was long ago established, as a decisive in- 
fluence in public affairs. South Carolina, 
the head and front of the Old South, is 
now swept by a political revolution as rad- 
ical as the emancipation of the slaves in 
1865. Texas, where the old order never 
got complete foothold, is now passing 
under the same control, so easily that it is 
not half understood what weighty concerns 
are involved in the coming political move- 
ments of this growing state. Other states, 
especially on the Gulf, are rent by the 
same movement from below. It is evident 
that this is no surface or temporary affair. 
Its present political and financial theories 
will be largely modified by the rough 
discipline of responsible power. But the 
movement is in the line of American civil- 
ization, and, however checked or misdi- 
reoted for the time, will finally prevail. 

The wise observer of southern affairs will 
greatly mistake if he insists on the exclu- 
sive observation of the old conflict of races 
and the political condition of the negro. 
For the coming decade, the place to watch 
the South is in this movement of the rising 
Third Estate. What it demands and what 
it can achieve in political, social, and 
industrial affairs ; what changes can be 
wrought in itself by the great uplifting 
forces of American civilization, — by edu- 
cation, including the influence of the fam- 
ily, the church, and the school, — on these 
things will depend the fate of this impor- 
tant section of our country for years to 



come. And on the outcome of this move- 
ment hangs the near future of the race 
question, — whether the swarming millions 
of colored citizens in these sixteen states 
will gradually reach their fit position in 
the body politic, or the whole South be 
plunged into the horrors of a race war, 
which will once more demand the strong 
arm of the nation to save that section from 
suicide. 

The present essay — the Third Estate of 
the South — is an honest attempt to give 
my own opinions concerning this, one of 
the most important movements in the his- 
tory of the Republic. The assumption of 
infallible wisdom and the ventilation of 
wholesale theories, North and South, in 
the discussion of southern affairs, is the 
misery of our public life. A virtual resi- 
dence of ten years in this region, includ- 
ing all the sixteen states, with good oppor- 
tunities for observation, has deepened the 
impression that, of all the social and civic 
puzzles that confront the American social 
scientist and statesman, no knot is so tan- 
gled, so difficult to be undone, so dan- 
gerous to be cut by the sword, as this. 
To-day the South, as a section, has passed 
into a permanent minority of sixteen of 
the forty-four states. But it is still possi- 
ble to array these states again in a conflict 
that would inflict a wound on the south- 
ern member through which the Republic 
would bleed to death. It is " easy as 
preaching " to embroil and exasperate 
whole commonwealths, great classes and 
races, in a permanent misunderstanding 
that not even another Washington or Lin- 
coln could reconcile. Even as concerns 
the South itself, the question is one of vital 
interest. The spectacle of the five hun- 
dred thousand white people of South Car- 
olina split into hostile clans by a political 
campaign now foaming on the ragged reef 
of violence is inexpressibly painful and dis- 
couraging. I shall not try to deal with 
this question by the ambitious methods of 
grand analysis, abstract theorizing, or in- 
flated prophecy. If I can cast a little 
side light upon this procession, as it moves 
on its twilight path, it may not be in vain 
that I occupy the time of the reader. 

In the European sense, there never was 
a Southern aristocracy. The descendants 
of the few European families of the favored 
class who drifted to the colonies never had 
a perceptible influence after the War of 



THE THIRD ESTATE OF THE SOUTH. 



301 



the Revolution. The abolition of all special 
privileges reduced the superior colonial 
class to the condition of the leading class 
in a republic of white men. There was a 
social " upper ten," in the original south- 
ern Atlantic colonies, that held on indefi- 
nitely. But that largely disappeared, as a 
family affair, beyond the Alleghanies, where 
the new leading class made its way upward 
by personal power and solid service as 
certainly as in the northwestern states. 

But, in the American political sense, 
there was and has been, up to the present 
time, a dominant class in this portion of 
the country more powerful for all the issues 
of public life than any order of nobility in 
Europe since the French Revolution. It 
was, primarily, a combination of land- 
holders ; practically, an aristocracy of the 
dollar. From the peculiar condition of 
the country and its monopoly of certain 
industrial products, the people of the South 
adopted and tied itself to the system of 
slave labor, cast off by the North as un- 
profitable, impolitic, and dangerous at the 
formation of the Republic. Whatever of 
anti-slavery sentiment — and there was a 
great deal — lingered in the early history 
of these states was swept down stream by 
the gathering tide of the dominating indus- 
trial and political interests. So it came to 
pass, in time, that a great combination of 
men, separated from each other by abysses 
of social, religious, and educational repul- 
sions, found common cause in the protec- 
tion of slavery in the old and its introduction 
to the new southern and southwestern 
states. The diaries and correspondence 
of Judge Story and John Quincy Adams, 
during their early years in Washington, are 
full of this observation of the formidable 
power of this combination, — its skilful 
handling of Congress, its invariable success 
in every conflict with a half-conscious and 
divided North. 

And, without indorsing the exaggerated 
rhetoric of our southern college commence- 
ments concerning the splendor of this class 
during " the Golden Age " of southern so- 
ciety, we may grant to this combination the 
praise of remarkable ability and, on some 
lines, of broad foresight in national affairs. 
It was composed almost wholly of the 
ablest, most politic, and persistent class in 
modern history, — ■ the British upper-middle 
class, — modified by the influences and 
interests of its peculiar position on the 



edge of Christendom. It made all things 
subordinate to the chief end of favoring the 
southern ambition to become the ruling 
power of the country. The professional 
classes became its spokesmen and allies. 
The leisure of its landed proprietors fos- 
tered a universal ambition among its young 
men for political activity as the be-all and 
end-all of life. Its schools were a repro- 
duction of the British system of education 
a century ago, — universities, colleges, and 
academies for the upper white class, more 
completely under the administration of the 
Protestant clergy than the schools of Cath- 
olic Europe are now under the control of 
that astute priesthood, well adjusted to lift 
up the promising youth below to compan- 
ionship with his betters, and elbow off the 
" common herd " into a wide-spread illit- 
eracy. Its women, among the most bril- 
liant and capable in the world, were no 
such tribe of imbeciles and idlers as we 
fancied in the North. The southern matron 
in her plantation life was one of the most 
overtaxed and devoted working women of 
her sex. Outside this domain female cul- 
ture gravitated to the social ability which 
gave her the lead at Washington, and till 
a late period made her the nation's best 
social foot put foremost on the shores of 
Europe. 

This political aristocracy, in all vital 
affairs, governed the Republic till it was 
moved to rise up and divide the nation in 
1 86 1. It instigated and brought on the 
condition of war against the Indians, Great 
Britain, and Mexico, by which the country 
was distracted through its first seventy 
years. It was the author of the magnifi- 
cent scheme of the expansion of territory 
which gave us the empire of Louisiana, 
Florida, Texas, the Pacific Coast, — all the 
additions to our territory except the latest 
purchase, Alaska. It led in the settlement 
of the West, following the sagacious policy 
of Washington, whose eye was always glanc- 
ing over to the wilderness beyond the Al- 
leghanies. Tennessee and Kentucky were 
in a blaze of Indian border war, while the 
Northwest slumbered almost undisturbed. 

It is difficult to understand why a class 
so able and astute in many ways was led 
on to the hazardous experiment of dividing 
the Union in i860. With the Constitution 
on its side, with an indefinite power of 
Congressional obstruction, it could have 
kept slavery for a long generation, and 



302 



THE THIRD ESTATE OF THE SOUTH. 



made the country pay the cost of a modi- 
fied system of emancipation. The reasons 
seem to be found in the absorption of a 
powerful society, engrossed in the work of 
self-preservation, in a strangely isolated 
position. Pushed off to the border of 
civilization, with only a half-barbarous 
Mexico and a boundless wilderness on the 
southwest, and a vast and lonely seaboard 
all around, shut off by its own theory and 
purpose from contact with the rising tide 
of progressive modern life, its literary, pro- 
fessional, and social influences all captured 
and held in subjection by the political in- 
tolerance which is the most unrelenting 
form of tyranny, it was not strange that its 
group of accomplished statesmen fell into 
the delusion, not only of their own sec- 
tional invincibility, but honestly believed 
that their political allies in the North would, 
in the last event, consent to their demand 
of virtual permanent control of the general 
government, or a separation on sectional 
lines. A distinguished citizen of Boston, 
during the summer preceding Mr. Lincoln's 
election, was for a time in daily confiden- 
tial communication with Jefferson Davis. 
He reports that he found his distinguished 
acquaintance completely possessed with the 
idea of the military and civic superiority 
of the South, and the willingness of the 
dominant party in the North to consent to 
whatever it should demand. 

How this came out we all know. The 
world has acknowledged the prodigious 
ability and matchless devotion with which 
the dominant class went through this des- 
perate programme, to the terrible end of 
its own destruction. Its military com- 
manders have furnished many forcible and 
picturesque and one noble figure to Amer- 
ican history. Its statesmanship, now dis- 
paraged, was probably as competent as a 
cause so at odds with the trend of modern 
civilization would admit. But we do not 
yet recognize fairly the great services ren- 
dered to the South and the nation, later 
on, by this class, even in the demoralized 
state in which it was left by the war, when 
not one in ten of its families was found 
upon or has since stood on a solid financial 
footing. Its young men were scattered to 
the southwest, to the northwest, to the 
growing cities, leaving the open country in 
charge of a class that, in the old time, had 
little influence in affairs. Its women gath- 
ered up the wrecks of a great destruction, 



in true American style ; and to-day the 
young women of the better sort of south- 
ern families are the hope of the country, 
rehabilitating the homes, the soul of the 
church, the best school-teachers, the lead- 
ers in the temperance reform, on the look- 
out for all industrial opportunities that can 
be used. 

The leaders in the war naturally became 
the leaders of reconstruction politics. And, 
whatever may be the verdict of history 
concerning the way in which the eleven 
ex-Confederate states have been placed in 
line to receive a share of the progressive 
life of the country, the display of ability 
has fully borne out their old reputation. 
The South to-day owes about all it has of 
order and law, the common school for all 
classes and both races, the restoration of 
its religious and educational affairs, to the 
administration of this class. The great 
obstacle to the progress of the negro is 
not his old master class ; for among these 
people are often found the wisest and most 
Christian views concerning the develop- 
ment of their old bondmen, and an amount 
of personal sacrifice and patience that only 
a constant" observer can appreciate. I do 
not know what New Boston, with her five 
hundred thousand people, would do if sud- 
denly overwhelmed by an avalanche of the 
seven hundred thousand South Carolina 
negroes, marshalled by our redoubtable 
friend, Gen. B. F. Butler, in a solid col- 
ored contingent, to capture the city govern- 
ment, administer its vast interests, handle 
its twenty million debt, and, in public af- 
fairs, represent it to the world. I fancy 
the " weight of the meeting " would there 
prevail, by some of the numerous methods 
by which an Anglo-Saxon community every- 
where, in the end, manages to put inferi- 
ority on the back seat and land the man- 
agement of vital affairs in the upper story. 

But it was inevitable that this long lease 
of power by the southern dominant class 
should come to an end. In New England 
and New York, the aristocratic states of 
the old North, this change was gradually 
wrought, — by the educational influences 
that prepared the humbler classes, native 
or foreign born, for the responsibilities of 
power. Eighty-five per cent of the men 
worth a hundred thousand dollars or more, 
in these states, began with nothing but this 
outfit. But in the South the progress of the 
Third Estate has been slow : indeed, until 



THE THIRD ESTATE OF THE SOUTH. 



303 



the past twenty years, it had hardly begun. 
But all things hasten, even in the piney 
woods or mountain realms of our South- 
land ; and now, under the simple name of 
a " Farmers' Alliance," this mighty army 
of the common people has been revealed, 
like a frowning mountain world uncovered 
by a rising mist. Already it may be pre- 
dicted that the old order, as far as it de- 
pended on the European qualities of family 
and class training, has gone by. Here- 
after, the South follows the North in the 
rush to the front of the fittest who survive. 
And the contest for place will be on indus- 
trial lines there as here. 

For a time to come I believe the negro 
question is to be held in partial subordina- 
tion by this great uprising of the Third 
Estate. To suppose that eight millions of 
citizens, in the condition of our southern 
negroes, twenty-five years out of personal 
slavery, can be wrenched from their pres- 
ent position and shot ahead of the twelve 
millions of plain white people who have 
been on the ground for two hundred years, 
and must become the dominant power of 
the South for generations to come, is only 
to indulge in the dream of an enthusiast. 
But whether the white man of the Third 
Estate can rid himself of the old theories 
of race and caste, and adopt the American 
idea that all men shall be fairly tested by 
what they can do, depends on many con- 
tingencies. Is it possible or probable, in 
a period sufficiently brief to avoid the 
danger of a disastrous race conflict, that 
this vast constituency can be brought over 
to the practical American view of giving to 
every child the great American chance in 
life ? I do not know. But I greatly hope ; 
and the sources of my hope, or some of 
them, I now declare. 

When the history of the South descends 
from the realm of romance, where it still 
lingers, to the solid ground of fact, it will 
be seen how absurd everywhere outside 
the domain of legend is the impression of 
a radical difference between its original 
population and the old Northeast. No- 
body pretends that the Southwest, beyond 
the Alleghanies, was peopled by a line of 
"gentler" descent than the Northwest. 
About all the South had to show in Revo- 
lutionary days of great statesmanship and 
eminent patriotism was, like the similar 
class in the North, a descent from the re- 
spectable middle estate of Great Britain. 



But, when we turn to the Third Estate, — 
always the majority, and now rising to the 
head and front of the new South, — we 
find the source of its power, as in the 
North, in the mixture of populations from 
a dozen sorts of vigorous European people. 
The Catholic Churchman and dissenting 
Englishman of various social degrees, the 
Scotch and North Irish Protestant, the 
early German of the valley of Virginia, 
the Huguenot of South Carolina, the High- 
lander, Hebrew, and other miscellany of 
old Georgia, the Creole, Frenchman, and 
Spaniard, in Louisiana, all went into the 
seething cauldron of the early colonial life. 
Up to a generation before the war came in 
a steady immigration of excellent people 
from New England and the middle states. 
I rarely visit a town in the five old Atlantic 
commonwealths that I do not find the de- 
scendants of these people, — always glad 
to renew the old-time associations with 
home. The accident of a change of resi- 
dence alone prevented the Rhetts of South 
Carolina from being a Boston, and the lat- 
ter Winthrops of Massachusetts a Charles- 
ton, family. Along with this uniformly 
good stock drifted in at an early date a 
baser element, brought to the colonies on 
indenture, — the lower sort of the English 
stock, whose descendants even now in 
Maryland and Delaware rank low in the 
social scale. The growing power of slav- 
ery intensified the separation of the re- 
spectable sort from the common lot. The 
illiteracy of whole regions of the country 
wrought its perfect work in the " poor 
white trash," — resembling the northern 
tramp, except that he is not only too shift- 
less to work, but too lazy to tramp. 

How the strange population of the great 
central mountain world — near two millions 
at present — was formed nobody seems to 
know. This region was a mysterious "no- 
man's-land" till the enterprise of the last 
twenty-five years revealed it, with all its 
natural sublimity and beauty and its indus- 
trial importance, to an astonished world. 
Perhaps from the Revolutionary Tories of 
the adjacent states, from criminals, outcasts, 
eccentrics, and broken-down people in gen- 
eral, with a sprinkling of more ambitious 
blood, was made up that people which even 
now, seen among the mountains overlooking 
the valley of Virginia, but better observed 
in Eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, Western 
North Carolina, and Northern Georgia, 



304 



THE THIRD ESTATE OF THE SOUTH. 



sends forth a louder cry for the missionary 
of civilization than any portion of the 
Republic. 

So far as variety of material is con- 
cerned, the old colonial South had an 
equal mixture of blood with the old North. 
Of late the trend of European immigration 
has not taken a Southern direction, and 
the per cent of foreign-born population in 
all the southern states east of the Missis- 
sippi is very small. A most interesting 
fact for the historical inquirer is the ex- 
planation of the origin of the southern 
white people, and the romance of the 
reality will eclipse the glamour of rhetorical 
mist in which the origin of this section 
has been involved. 

So it has come about that the present 
population of this grade in the South is far 
more homogeneous than in the North. 
The rough training of the pioneer life 
welded these various elements into one 
people. Even the Louisiana Creole is 
yielding. A leading merchant of New 
Iberia, the heart of the Teche district, told 
me that twenty years ago only one in five 
of his country customers attempted to 
speak English ; while now only one in five 
is compelled to trade in French. A brisk 
colony from the Northwest has invaded the 
prairies of Southwestern Louisiana ; and a 
Congregational College, with a Yankee 
president, is established on the old domain 
of the Padres. Yet there are still great 
differences in education and efficiency in 
the different elements of this people. The 
coast country, including the immense piney 
woods empire, still produces a considerable 
population of a sort less hopeful than any 
other of whatsoever "previous condition." 
The lovely Piedmont region, surrounding 
the great central mountain realm of the 
old South, has a farming population greatly 
resembling the New England country peo- 
ple of my boyhood. The states beyond 
the Mississippi — Missouri, Western Ar- 
kansas, and Texas, the new Southwest — 
have received more immigration since the 
war than all the rest of the South : of the 
best and common sort of its own ; some- 
what from abroad ; from the Northwest, 
whose people seem inclined to edge down 
into a milder clime • perhaps also a con- 
siderable return wave from the crowd that 
settled Southern Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana 
in by-gone days. It is said a million young 
men from the southern country districts 



have gone to the cities, the Northwest 
and the Southwest, since 1865. They 
have left on the ground, in some portions 
of the old South, a white population, so 
far as the men are concerned, inferior to 
the old-time occupants, — less capable of 
reclaiming the country, less inclined to deal 
fairly with the colored folk. 

But it is almost hopeless to draw a dia- 
gram of the Southern Third Estate as it 
now exists. Nobody, even to the " manor 
born," can do it to the satisfaction of 
the southern people ; for the pride of state, 
locality, sect, and social condition — what 
Mr. Breckenridge calls " the provincial 
flavor " — are " solid " against any decided 
estimate of matters so delicate. Before 
the war, lines were more sharply drawn. 
While alert to capture and lift up to com- 
panionship and position the rising talent 
of the lower class, the old-time ruling set 
drew hard and fast lines between them- 
selves and the ordinary non-slaveholding 
people. My first experience of South 
Carolina was in 1856, — in a stage-coach 
bound for the Catskill Mountain House, 
New York, filled with a brilliant Charleston 
group, chiefly ladies. Completely ignoring 
my presence, the only man of the company 
entertained his fair companions all the way 
up by his adventures on a tour through 
the upper counties of " his nation," talking 
of the people there, amid peals of laughter, 
in a way that reminded one of Dr. Johnson 
and the literati of London a century ago, 
defining a Scotchman as " a good fellow, 
if caught early." Till the war, a property 
condition of representation in the South 
Carolina legislature gave a power to the 
lowland slaveholders which was used in a 
way that has come back to plague the 
commonwealth in the new upheaval of 
affairs. 

The Civil War was the great university 
of the lower masses of the southern white 
people. The grand army caught them in 
its all-enclosing net ; locked them up in 
its fierce conscription ; marched them all 
over their own country, with occasional 
visits to Northland, outside and inside a 
Union prison camp. To a people so pre- 
ternaturally eager to see and hear and talk, 
this was a godsend, — the beginning of 
the blessing that has come to the southern 
poor white man equally with his colored 
brother from the collapse of the Rebellion. 
The break-up of the old estates, especially 



THE THIRD ESTATE OE THE SOUTH. 



805 



in the Gulf region, brought large numbers 
of these people down to the lowlands as 
owners of farms. The opening up of 
Central Florida sent a wave of immigration 
from the piney woods people that still 
contests the northern and western occupa- 
tion. The mighty development of the 
railroad system has remanded the coast 
country of the Atlantic and Gulf to a 
secondary place, and brought up the Pied- 
mont region, in which a large number of 
thriving towns have arisen, and which, with 
the mining and timber lands, is the seat of 
the new southern prosperity. The new 
Southwest is growing almost as fast as the 
new Northwest, — an exception to the old 
South, outside of special districts. 

The marvellous growth in the South, of 
which we hear so much, is largely a devel- 
opment of the mining country bordering 
the mountains, where a number of new 
towns have sprung up and capital is being 
invested ; the lumber country and special 
agricultural districts. But much of the 
old landed realm is still in no condition to 
be rejoiced over. There are more people 
at work than of old, black and white. The 
division of farms has stimulated production. 
In certain quarters, skilled agriculture is 
taking the place of the old-time fumbling 
with the soil. New fields in Florida, Mis- 
sissippi, and Texas are opening for the cul- 
ture of cotton, fruits, "truck," and staples. 
The country people are living somewhat 
better than ten years ago. But the intol- 
erable " lien system," whereby the town 
merchant practically owns the land and 
enslaves its occupants, is a dispensation 
such as afflicts no large body of civilized 
people besides in our country. How 
multitudes of good folk can live at all 
under such a systematic plunder is only 
accounted for by their moderate demands 
for living and the impossibility of getting 
out of the deadlock alive. The attempt 
of a class of southern politicians, in the 
interest of their pet economic theories, to 
compare the condition of this portion of 
their people with that of the farmers of 
New England and the established portion 
of the West, is simply ludicrous to an 
observer of the different portions of the 
country. More than half the people in 
whole regions of the South outside the 
better class in the cities are compelled 
to live in a way that is unknown in these 
states, except to the lower class of the 



foreign born, with little outlook for better 
times. But this country is capable of re- 
cuperation by capital, skill, and especially 
the occupation of small farms by industri- 
ous and thrifty people. In time, the bet- 
ter class of the negroes will come into 
possession of a great deal of this open 
country and reclaim it. 

It would greatly change the northern 
estimate of southern affairs, could the fact 
be understood that confronts the traveller 
through the length and breadth of the 
Southland, — that through vast regions, 
even of the older states, the people are 
living under the conditions of a border 
civilization. Not a border country in the 
sense of our new western frontier, — a 
vanishing " out into the West," with a 
furious civilization, armed to the teeth with 
all the implements of modern progress 
on its heels. Not the terrible border life 
that railroad extension and the mining 
" boom " make in the new villages extempo- 
rized in a howling southern wilderness. 
Hundreds of these new towns in the South, 
where the iron horse reins up and the great 
steam leviathan wheels round, are a refuge 
for the drift and diabolism of the whole 
surrounding country, which appears regu- 
larly, on " dress parade," in the new city. 
One little metropolis of this sort in East 
Tennessee has enjoyed the luxury of a 
hundred murders since it was struck by 
the "boom." But this is the old-time 
border life, where people lived far away 
from each other and the world, with mea- 
gre privilege of travel, rarely used, the 
only town the county seat, and that not 
often visited. Here is developed an obsti- 
nate type of personal independence that 
stands out, like the iron handle of the 
town pump, in either sex. But what is 
not done that can be done in such a life ? 
The man attends to his own little world ; 
defends himself as best he can against 
wild creatures and wilder men ; makes a 
sharp practical code of the neighborhood, 
that underlies the law of the land, and is 
administered far more thoroughly than the 
latter. These populations, once polarized 
by the plantation families, which made a 
centre of superior living, are now often 
left adrift by the decay of this class and 
the breaking up of the old order generally. 
The census of Virginia in 1880 showed 
not a quarter of a million of her people, 
even in villages. And, although the growth 



306 



THE THIRD ESTATE OF THE SOUTH. 



of what are called "cities" has been more 
marked during the past ten years, yet, out- 
side of occasional districts, the vast major- 
ity of the southern white people live in an 
all-out-of-doors style, not easily understood 
in the crowded communities of the old 
East and large portions even of the new 
West. 

While this sphere of life is favorable to 
some of the primitive virtues, — hospi- 
tality, good feeling, and sociability, — and 
to the absence of some of the vices of 
great cities, yet the dearth of the agencies 
of the higher civilization is a fact almost 
incredible, unless experienced. Even 
Texas, the most prosperous southern state, 
has yet no system of roads ; and only three 
thousand of her eight thousand country 
schools have a school-house over their 
heads. The appalling loneliness of the 
vast " Lone Star " empire has already 
driven more than a third of its people 
into villages and cities. But in the older 
states, a full half of the people of both 
races live outside the opportunities for 
schooling, reading, churching, and the use 
of a tolerable press, — most of the modern 
agencies of social uplifting that are the 
commonplace of the North. The South, 
in winter, outside the towns, lies under a 
fearful embargo of mud, which shuts up 
the people to such a home life as can be 
enjoyed under the circumstances. The 
average country school does not last a full 
four months, is placed at inconvenient dis- 
tances, often kept in an unfit school-house, 
— a peril to the health of the children of 
the poorer people. Less than sixty per 
cent of southern children in the open 
country, where three-fourths their whole 
number live, represents the average attend- 
ance on school less than four months in 
the year. Probably not a hundred " cities " 
of the South now have a free library, or a 
good circulating library accessible to the 
masses of the white people. The city 
daily journals have a limited circulation 
away from the towns and railroads ; and 
the country press is too often, at best, 
feeble and misleading. Thousands of peo- 
ple do not read that, but depend upon 
common report for news. The signifi- 
cance of the Scripture phrase — "wars 
and rumors of war" — is apparent in a 
community largely dependent upon rumor 
and what the popular leaders choose to 
tell of public affairs. A considerable por- 



tion of middle-aged men are of the class 
that obtained little or no schooling during 
the war and the ten succeeding years, and 
have come up, a degenerate race from their 
parents, to shoulder the weighty responsi- 
bilities of the present. Here is the seat of 
the negrophobia that often blazes out into 
violence and outrage. It is not the delib- 
erate purpose or feeling of the better class 
of the southern people, but the inevitable 
result of the friction between the races, 
where a considerable element of the domi- 
nant race is so removed from the higher 
influences of American life. 

Yet the vast majority of this great popu- 
lation is of " native American " birth, and 
is all the time affected by the training- 
school of American life. The political 
speakers and preachers, the visit to the 
county town, the coming and going of the 
emigrating youth, the temperance agi- 
tation, the yearly revival meeting, the 
" boom," that is heard a great way off, 
like the thundering oncoming of the char- 
iot of the sun, the awakening eagerness to 
make money, which Dr. Johnson pro- 
nounced " about the best thing an honest 
man can do," — all these influences keep 
the drowsiest realm somewhat astir, and 
form a sort of education to several millions 
of these people, — on the whole better 
than schools without common sense. 
Even the mountain world is stirred to its 
silent depths. Twenty- five years hence, 
the class of people described in Miss Mur- 
free's novels may be as difficult to locate 
as the bison of the western prairies. 

I rode a whole day, in South Carolina, 
with the son of an old Connecticut River 
railroad president, who was stumping the 
region along the line from Charleston, S.C., 
to the Ohio River, soliciting grants of 
money and land for the route that will give 
the shortest access to the ocean from the 
Northwest. A dozen great lines of travel 
are penetrating this marvellous wilderness, 
so long an enchanted land in the heart of 
the old Republic. In half a century, this 
section of mountain country will become 
one of the most attractive portions of the 
United States, — much of it more fit for 
occupation and agreeable in climate than 
a good deal of New England. These 
mountain people were loyal in the late 
war. Wherever the Union army pene- 
trated, they fell in with vim. A hundred 
and forty thousand white soldiers were 



THE THIRD ESTATE OF THE SOUTH. 



307 



enlisted from this country, — twenty-four 
thousand more than from Vermont, New 
Hampshire, and Connecticut, seven thou- 
sand more than from nine of the present 
northwestern states. Eastern Kentucky 
gave more white soldiers to the Union 
army than its entire number of voters. 

In short, the Third Estate of the South 
is chiefly of good original stock, though for 
two hundred years content to sit on the 
back seat and rise up at the call of a superior 
class. But that drama is well on toward 
the fifth act. Radically sound, good- 
natured, energetic, looking in with all its 
eyes at the great, wide-open front door of 
the new American life, with the first enjoy- 
ment of the common school and the hunger 
and thirst for more ; hearing, afar off, the 
loud sound of the " forging ahead " of the 
grand new South, earnest and devout in 
religious faith, — here is a material for 
American citizenship such as nowhere else 
can be found in this world. We may well 
consider what a conservative force in na- 
tional affairs is here in training, — only 
needing the education of the time to bring 
to the front a people that will close up 
with the best elements of the Republic and 
" hold the fort " of an Anglo-Saxon, pro- 
gressive civilization against all raids from 
home or abroad. 

What can be done by the whole coun- 
try to aid in the evolution of this people 
in the Southland ? How can this great 
uprising be so directed that justice will be 
done, — not only to its superior class, 
which it will gradually displace and re- 
construct, but to the eight millions of 
colored folk alongside of which it must 
live? 

The first condition of social advance- 
ment is an understanding of the favorable 
elements in the problem. Even the " less 
favored " of this great population, the 
higher strata of which are well up, have 
several characteristics that deserve men- 
tion. 

First, this body of the southern people 
is not hopelessly committed to the fixed 
theories concerning government, social ar- 
rangements, and American affairs in gen- 
eral, which thirty years ago opened the 
"bloody chasm" we are all trying to fill 
up to-dav The exaggerated ideas of state 
sovereignty, the antiquated philosophy of 
eternal race distinction, the prejudice 
against modern ideas of education and 



industrial matters, which characterized the 
old leading class and still somewhat affect 
its rising generation, are not " to the 
manor born " with them. Indeed, a new 
state of the Union was formed in 1862 
from the breaking out from these ideas 
by an important district of the Old Do- 
minion. That the masses of the South 
have followed the leading exponents of 
these views, even through the destruction 
of civil war, is not decisive, since there 
had been little open discussion of such 
matters among them previous to i860. 
But there are significant indications that, 
wherever the broader American ideas are 
fairly presented, without partisan or sec- 
tional animus, there will be found, in this 
quarter, a hearing that prophesies a hope- 
ful future. The eagerness with which 
the country people have turned to the 
common school, — the special anathema 
of the old order in the old time, — and now 
for twenty years have supported it, bearing 
the chief burden of its colored department, 
almost to their full ability, and the con- 
stant demand for its improvement, is a 
case in point. Co-education of southern 
boys and girls has always been unpopular 
in respectable southern circles ; but in the 
common schools it is well-nigh universal, 
and is now introduced in the state univer- 
sities of three states. At the Miller Man- 
ual Labor School in Virginia, under the 
shadow of the university, four hundred 
youth of the humbler white class are 
schooled together, with a respect for 
womanhood worthy the higher ideal of the 
chivalry that interprets the Golden Rule. 
The special horror of the southern upper 
class is the education of the colored and 
white races together. But at Berea, on 
the edge of Old Blue Grass Kentucky, I 
found one of the best collegiate institu- 
tions of that state, where a large number 
of white mountain boys and girls were 
" improving their minds," and making 
manhood and womanhood, with a third as 
many lowland negroes, with absolutely no 
friction. Of course, the old-time notions 
concerning labor have passed out of sight 
of this, the rising industrial class of the 
South. I do not know what political pol- 
icy or party in national affairs is to prevail 
in the future. But I am sure that another 
twenty years of fair opportunity to present 
the broad-gauge American idea of affairs 
to this people would result in a state of 



308 



THE THIRD ESTATE OF THE SOUTH. 



opinion that would leave the country safe, 
whatever party might dispense official 
" pie " at Washington. 

Second, I believe in this people will be 
found a mine of enthusiastic and intelligent 
patriotism. The war against the Union 
was not an uprising of the southern masses, 
but a deliberate policy of the class that 
had its confidence, — never seriously con- 
templated by three-fourths of the Southern 
people. Once in, they fought, as American 
men always do when that is the business 
on hand. But, long before the bitter end, 
it was understood that the hearts of great 
numbers of the Confederate soldiery were 
no longer in the cause. I was informed 
by a distinguished gentleman in Richmond 
that months before the end, on a tour 
through the mountains of Virginia, he met 
great numbers of deserters and disaffected 
people who did not propose longer to 
fight for a cause that boded so little good 
for their kind. The non-slaveholding class 
has no such prejudice against the negro as 
the master class : indeed, this prejudice is 
far more a repulsion of caste and a memory 
of " previous condition " than a theory of 
race. They do not especially love the 
negro : the lower strata look upon him as 
a dangerous rival in many ways. But it 
will not need a miraculous conversion to 
convince them that the welfare of an 
American state consists in standing by 
equal rights, justice and fair play all round, 
leaving vexed questions of social import 
to regulate themselves, as they invariably 
will. 

Third, another special trait that has at- 
tracted my attention from the first is the 
teachableness of the children of this class, 
with a reverence for superiors and confi- 
dence in those they believe friendly and 
unselfish. There is no better material than 
great numbers of these youth for the natural 
methods of teaching, which wake up the 
desire for improvement, spite of untrained 
manners and habits of living. I live among 
boys and girls who are making such efforts 
to gain a scrap of the opportunity so boun- 
tifully flung into the streets before all the 
children of our northern cities as makes 
this one of the most pathetic spectacles of 
American life. All the stories that have 
thrilled the churches of the North concern- 
ing the eagerness for knowledge of the 
young negro can be paralleled among the 
children and youth of the humbler white 



class, with the important difference that the 
average white child of Anglo-Saxon parent- 
age, even of illiterate descent, seems to 
have at the bottom of his mind a pair of 
pincers by which he takes fast hold of 
what goes in, and generally reveals the 
power of heredity in a people for centuries 
the leaders of the progressive society of 
the world. 

All these and other elements of hope- 
fulness encourage the apostle of the new 
American life in his dealing with the most 
needy of this class, and insure the hearty 
co-operation of the upper strata. And, 
now, what can the North and the nation do 
to hasten the coming of this great uprising 
among twelve millions of white American 
people, on whose future relations to Ameri- 
can ideas the fate of these great common- 
wealths depends? 

First, it can aid, in all public and private 
ways, to put on the ground a good working 
system of country common schools, of at 
least six months' duration a year, where 
all children can receive the elements of 
education, with the moral and social disci- 
pline which is " half the battle " in the 
training for American citizenship. As fast 
as the simple elements of industrial training 
can be imparted, it will be well. But the 
great need of the Third Estate youngster 
of the South is a revival of brains that will 
open his eyes to the wide world outside 
the home lot and form a habit of good 
reading and sound thinking on what is 
ahead of him. That itself will be a great 
industrial uplift, and in time revolutionize 
the methods of unskilled labor, which are 
the chief hindrance to southern advance- 
ment in material things. I still hold to 
the deliberate opinion that the country 
people of the South are doing about all 
they can for their common schools. Spe- 
cial districts will be able to approach the 
cities and villages in their ability for local 
taxation. But for two hundred years the 
common people of the South have been 
taught that " taxation is tyranny," and that 
" economy," even pushed to public stingi- 
ness, is the ideal of good government. 
Even were this pestilent heresy exploded, 
and the people convinced that wise and 
generous taxation is the life-blood of re- 
publican society, — since, of all things, 
American civilization is the most expensive 
in the outlay, though the most economical 
in the income, — the power to bear taxa- 



THE THIRD ESTATE OF THE SOUTH. 



301) 



tion for putting on the ground the vast 
educational plant required for the white 
and colored schools, chiefly at the expense 
of the white population, burdened as at 
present, is not there. The persistent de- 
nial of this fact by a portion of the northern 
metropolitan press, in the interest of the 
land agents and the investors in southern 
capital, has gone far to publish a notion 
that Dr. Curry pronounces a " stupendous 
humbug." 

To my mind, the defeat of the Senate 
bill for National Aid to Education, last 
winter, was such a mistake that, could it 
be fathered on either party, it would en- 
title that combination to a retirement from 
power for a quarter of a century, on the 
ground of political incapacity. No critic 
of New England, however malignant, has 
drawn a bill of impeachment of Yankee 
statesmanship so formidable as was fur- 
nished by the votes of five New England 
senators that accomplished that defeat, re- 
presenting three states that lead the Union 
in the enjoyment of educational opportu- 
nities. A cause so manifestly just and 
wise and essential to southern progress as 
some form of national aid for the time 
needed to put the educational affairs of 
these commonwealths on their feet is sure 
to come up for renewed action. The bill 
of the venerable Senator Morrill, for addi- 
tional aid to agricultural colleges, including 
those for colored people, which has passed 
both Houses of Congress, is fraught with 
positive good. These schools are among 
the most valuable in the South, especially 
for the youth of the poorer classes. With 
the re-enforcement of fifteen thousand to 
twenty-five thousand dollars a year, they 
can be greatly improved, becoming every- 
where, as they have become in Mississippi 
and Texas, an important element in the 
movement for skilled labor for all people. 
A generous system of national aid for edu- 
cation, administered, as it could and would 
have been, by the state educational author- 
ities, established at the close of the war, 
would have saved us from the bitter an- 
tagonisms awakened by the election bills 
of the present day. Said a radical politi- 
cian to William H. Seward concerning the 
fugitive slave law, — one of the most mis- 
chievous ever enacted by Congress, — 
" What would you have done, as President 
of the United States, had that bill come 
up to you from Congress ? " " If I had 



been President of the United States, that 
bill would never have reached the White 
House." The statesmanship that will save 
our country is that which works at long 
range, on the lines of the great uplifting 
agencies of civilization, in hope of gradual 
and permanent advancement, dispensing, 
as far as may be, with the old bungling rule 
of the sword and constable beyond the 
line of personal disobedience of the law. 

Third, industrial education, in its broad- 
est and most practical form, with good 
schooling in the elements of English, must 
become a great factor in the uplift of the 
new South. All the arguments used for its 
application to the negro have full applica- 
tion to the children and youth of the Third 
Estate. Especially is this true of the young 
women of this class. The lower forms of 
woman's work, with an increasing push 
into the operative and other modes of profit- 
able labor, are falling into the hands of the 
colored women. Large numbers of these 
girls, in the excellent industrial mission 
schools of the South, are becoming suc- 
cessful workers in a variety of occupations 
for women. Whether the white girl of the 
South is to " lie off" and " play lady," while 
her colored sister " toils and spins," or take 
her part in the rising sphere of profitable 
industry, the three hundred and fifty ways 
by which an American woman can get a 
respectable living, is to be decided by this 
movement for the training of the hand of 
the rising womanhood of the South. Sev- 
eral of the southern states already admit 
girls to the agricultural colleges. But the 
Mississippi plan seems the most popular. 
This state supports a great industrial and 
Normal School, with free tuition for white 
girls, — a sort of college " of all work," 
where a young woman can get a good 
academical education and be trained for 
teaching while compelled to take some 
branch of industrial training. Though 
somewhat hindered by political interfer- 
ence in its administration, this school is 
becoming a positive success, and reflects 
great credit on a group of admirable 
women who pushed it through the legis- 
lature, and are still watching by its cradle. 
Georgia is about to establish a similar 
school at her old capital, Milledgeville. 
The plan is so feasible that I look to its 
establishment in all these states. 

Bishop Atticus G. Haygood, the fore- 
most educational and religious leader of 



310 



THE THIRD ESTATE OF THE SOUTH. 



the whole southern people, has inaugurated 
his elevation to a bishopric in the Methodist 
Church, South, by a wise and noble plan 
for a great school of a similar class for 
southern white girls, in the Alabama min- 
ing country, on the border between " down 
South " and the North, where the daugh- 
ters of the impoverished rich and the am- 
bitious poor can be educated at a rate that 
will enable thousands of good girls to obtain 
their great and only chance for education. 
The next million that goes down that way 
from northern benevolence should be given 
to Bishop Haygood, in whose hands the 
vanishing surplus of the United States 
treasury would have been wisely invested 
in " the building for the children " of the 
people of all conditions in these states. 
It is one of the delusions that still abide 
in too many minds that the great industrial 
need of the South is cheap and unskilled 
labor, the toil of an ignorant peasantry. 
The desperate need of the South is intel- 
ligent labor in the masses, under the leader- 
ship of trained commanders of industry, — 
an army that will go forth " conquering and 
to conquer," into this marvellous world of 
opportunity. 

The white masses of the South need to 
be brought in range of that system of 
agencies of the higher American civilization 
now in operation even in the most remote 
Northwest, and which are the glory of the 
more prosperous states. It is impossible 
to describe the difference in the mental 
atmosphere in which a bright boy or girl, 
in an average county in South Carolina, 
Alabama, or Louisiana, is brought up, and 
that amid which his cousin lives, in Massa- 
chusetts, Ohio, or Wisconsin. It is all 
the difference between living in a country 
where the whole environment is educa- 
tional, and a country where education is a 
special thing, and the youth is, all the time, 
compelled to push out of his ordinary sur- 
roundings to gain it. A free library in 
every neighborhood, a better class of news- 
papers, a movement to " add to faith knowl- 
edge" in the church, — all these, now 
rapidly coming to the front in the prosper- 
ous cities, still wait for their day in the 
open country. Yet here is the place, 
almost the only place left in American life, 
where is yet leisure from engrossing work. 
Oh, what a boon to us hurried and wearied 
mortals would be that precious leisure, 
flowing like a great quiet river through 



these rural districts of the Southland ! 
Here is the place where all these beautiful 
and beneficent agencies would be best 
appreciated by the children and youth, 
who would accept them as eagerly as the 
children of New England, fifty years ago ; 
springing to them as to a bounteous feast. 

And is not the group of men and women 
already known who can bring the philos- 
ophy of social science down irom heaven 
to abide upon earth, and put into simple 
statement, in leaflets or short readable tracts, 
the knowledge that makes for good living 
and true prosperity? The South is now 
drugged with the theories of professional 
politicians. Now the tariff, now the negro, 
now the railroad, now the distant million- 
naire. is paraded up and down as the cause 
of " agricultural depression," the source 
of all southern woes. But let the social 
scientists " take an inning, " and tell the 
people what wasteful housekeeping, bad 
cookery, unskilled labor, unfit dress, igno- 
rance, superstition, shifdessness, vulgarity, 
and vice have to do with the undeniable 
trials of these, with other multitudes of the 
less favored of our American people. A 
railroad conductor, with a big head on his 
shoulders, said to me : " All along this 
route of five hundred miles the people 
would read tons of leaflets, tracts, any- 
thing containing good, sound information 
and advice on common things. I could 
distribute all that anybody would give me." 

But why go on ? Here is a people, not 
inferior in capacity to any upon earth, of ex- 
cellent original stock, appearing for the first 
time as a controlling element in sixteen 
great states of the Republic, in whose 
hands is the destiny of other millions just 
introduced to American citizenship. On 
them will depend the outcome of southern 
affairs for the coming generation more 
than upon all the rest of the country. 
What an appeal to the patriotism, the jus- 
tice, the Christian spirit, of the whole 
American people ! But alas for the sin, 
the shame, and the discouragement which 
stand between such a people and all that 
come to them in friendly co-operation ! 
I live all summer in sight of money enough 
thrown to the dogs and to the devil to 
place on the ground, in any of these 
states, the agencies which their own no- 
blest people are all ready to use for the 
public good. When the great Protestant 
churches, that still work at cross-purposes 



A YANKEE VISITOR IN THE SOUTH. 



311 



along the border, learn the wisdom of 
Christian statesmanship, close up their 
ranks, and pour a stream of northern 
money into this, the most fruitful mission 
field on earth, there will be more hope of 
the coming of the kingdom for which their 
prayers go up day and night before the Lord. 
The conviction forces itself upon a care- 
ful observer of these states that the time 
has passed when any set of leaders, any 
political or ecclesiastical party, can solve 
the difficult problems now set before them. 
It is doubtful if the foremost men, North 
and South, who were once arrayed as 
enemies in war, can =ver " see eye to 
eye," or repose that confidence in each 
other without which all dealing with mat- 
ters so delicate involves an ever-recurring 
exasperation. Napoleon said, " When a 
great thing is to be done in public affairs, 
keep away from the leaders, and go to the 
people." " The people " that will finally 
bring peace, confidence, reconciliation, 
through all our borders are the children 



and youth now being trained all over the 
land for the grandest effort of Christian 
administration that ever confronted a gen- 
eration of men. And the southern chil- 
dren on whom we are to largely depend, 
thirty years hence, for this glorious work 
of reconstruction and reconciliation are 
the boys and girls of this rising Third 
Estate and the negroes, — the youthful 
millions that now swarm this land of the 
South. The best we can do is to hold 
things as good as they are, with the hope 
of making some little headway year by 
year against sectional prejudice, provin- 
cialism, and all the enemies of the new 
Republic. But greater than all other 
things is the work to which we are called, 
— the education of the head, the hand, 
and the heart of the twenty millions of 
Young America. Then, as Thomas Jef- 
ferson said, " If we educate the children 
aright, our descendants will be wiser than 
we, and many things impossible to us will 
be easy to them." 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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